How advertiser tracking works, and what it can't tell you
Once a day, Longtrove looks at two bounded lists of an advertiser's public ads in Meta Ad Library for one country, records what it sees, and compares that with earlier days. It can tell you what appeared, what moved, and when it was last checked. It cannot see spend, results, targeting, or an advertiser's full catalog.
On this page
What is checked
For each advertiser you follow, and for the one country you chose, Longtrove opens that advertiser's page in Meta Ad Library once a day and records two lists: up to 100 ads ordered by Meta's highest-impression sort, and up to 100 ads ordered by most recent. The two lists overlap and can end early. Together they are not the advertiser's full catalog. Historical checks retain the limits used when they were collected.
When it is checked
Checks are scheduled daily and run from a collection system operated by Longtrove, not from your browser. A check can be late, fail, or capture only one of the two lists. Every page that shows evidence also shows when it was last collected, and any gap.
What a "change" is
A change is a comparison between two checks: an ad newly started according to its Meta start date; an ad first seen by Longtrove; an ad entering or leaving one of the two lists; a large move in position within a list; or an ad verified active outside the lists. The first check for an advertiser is a baseline; its ads are recorded as observed, not as new.
Start dates and ages
"Started" and "age" use the start date Meta reports. That is not proof of continuous running, of spend, or of success. "First seen by Longtrove" is when our checks first encountered the ad, which can be long after it started.
Active, inactive, unknown
An ad is "observed active" when the source reported it active at the time of a check. "Inactive" is shown only when the source explicitly reported it. An ad missing from the two lists is "outside the checked views", which is not the same as inactive.
Positions
Position (rank) is where an ad sat in a public ordering at check time. It is not spend, reach, return on ad spend, or any measure of results. Longtrove does not label ads as winners.
Country scope
A tracker describes one country's results. "All countries" describes the bounded results returned for that selection, not verified coverage of every country.
What Longtrove cannot see
These sampled commercial-ad observations do not establish an advertiser's budgets, spend, clicks, conversions, return on ad spend, targeting, or internal campaign structure. Repeated wording, shared destination links, and public ordering describe captured evidence; they do not prove strategy or results.